Donald J. Trump has made many decisions since becoming President of the United States that have offended the permanent political establishment in Washington; and in foreign policy, he has also shocked political elites in Britain and Europe by doing things that are simply not done. To take a recent notable example, in May Trump stopped pretending that payoffs to Iran would slow the ayatollahs from developing nuclear weapons. Before that, he angered pro-Arabists everywhere by moving the American embassy to Israel’s capital, Jerusalem. But perhaps the foreign policy decision most upsetting to politically correct sensibilities everywhere occurred on June 1, 2017 when the President announced that the US would withdraw from the Paris climate treaty.

In the months leading up to the announcement, intense pressure was put on Trump to stay in Paris from every direction — environmental pressure groups, Democrats in Congress, mainstream media, Hollywood celebrities, countless CEOs of international corporations, and several members of his own administration, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. The push by world leaders peaked at the G7 summit meeting in May 2017 in Sicily, but in the end all the cajoling and coaxing from Prime Minister May, Chancellor Merkel, President Macron, and EU Commission President Juncker did not convince Trump to break his campaign promise.

Although Trump made clear in his Rose Garden speech why undertaking international commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is not in America’s national interest, he created confusion when he added: “I’m willing to immediately work with Democratic leaders to either negotiate our way back into Paris, under terms that are fair to the United States and its workers, or to negotiate a new deal that protects our country and its taxpayers . . . And we’ll make it good, and we won’t be closing up our factories, and we won’t be losing our jobs.” He added to the confusion in January when, as the BBC reported, he said, “we could conceivably get back in”.

Perhaps these comments were made to show, not least to his daughter and son-in-law Ivanka and Jared Kushner, that he was not unreasonable. Or perhaps Trump is deliberately creating confusion because he thinks it is in his political interest.

Whatever the motive, his comments have led many political leaders and informed observers in London and other European capitals to a serious misunderstanding. Here is just one example: the French President Emmanuel Macron said in his address to Congress in April, “I’m sure, one day, the United States will come back and join the Paris agreement.”

It’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen in the first Trump administration or in a possible second Trump administration. And it will be very difficult for a future president — Democrat or Republican — to get the US back into Paris or any other UN agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal, oil, and gas.

To understand why the US is not going to be lured or dragged back into Paris, it’s necessary to take seriously President Trump’s energy agenda and the critical role it plays in his programme to revive economic growth to its historic rate of 3 per cent per year — a level never approached during President Obama’s eight years in office. There are two parts to the administration’s energy agenda: increasing energy production; and using America’s energy price advantage to unleash a manufacturing renaissance.

First, Trump is focused on establishing American global “energy dominance”. Progress toward this goal has been under way for the past decade and has nothing to do with government policy. In fact, it has been happening at an increasing pace despite efforts by the Obama administration to put on the brakes. It has happened because of the shale oil and gas revolution.

US oil production peaked in 1970 (as M. King Hubbert had predicted in 1956) at just over 10 million barrels per day and declined to a low of under 4 million barrels per day in 2008. That’s when exploiting unconventional resources in shale rock formations by combining hydraulic fracturing, used over a million times in conventional oil drilling since 1949, and more recent advances in horizontal drilling became commercially viable.

The results of technological innovation by people working in a free market have been as dramatic as they were unpredicted or undirected by government. In November 2017, US oil production surpassed 10 million barrels a day for the first time since 1970. America has passed Saudi Arabia and Russia as the top oil producer and has now passed Russia as the top gas producer.

The US still uses more oil than it produces, but within a decade is likely to become a net oil exporter. The effects of this stunning turnaround are already being seen in the US trade deficit. Petroleum products accounted for over 30 per cent of the trade deficit in 2008, but less than 10 per cent last year — or a swing of $233 billion.

The effects will also increasingly become apparent in world politics, especially now that Mike Pompeo has replaced Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. As the energy superpower, America’s geopolitical position becomes much stronger as the position of Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the other petro-states wanes. As for China, it is now the world’s largest energy user. Although China mines and burns more coal than the US (which is second in both categories), it produces roughly only one-third as much oil and one sixth as much gas as the US. Energy imports are likely to be a growing drag on the Chinese economy at least for several decades.

What should the US do with its immense reserves of coal, oil, and gas? President Obama and his allies in the climate industrial complex thought we should keep as much of it in the ground as possible. After failing in his first term to get legislation through Congress to restrict the use of fossil fuels, in 2013 Obama turned to using the Clean Air Act to promulgate new regulations that would force the closure of many existing coal-fired electric plants and ban the construction of new coal plants.

Obama’s domestic energy-rationing agenda made the Paris climate treaty possible. Since the Obama agenda was not set in law, but merely implemented through regulation, the Trump administration can undo that agenda without going to Congress. And that is exactly what the Environmental Protection Agency under Administrator Scott Pruitt is doing. The several rules designed to reduce the use of fossil fuels and thereby raise energy prices are being undone using the same rule-making process by which they were done.

The effects of Trump’s energy deregulatory agenda are likely to be huge. Lower energy prices will obviously benefit consumers. Electric rates for households in many American states are below 10 cents per kilowatt hour, while in Britain the rate is 22 cents and in Germany 35 cents. True, Californians and New Yorkers are paying 19 cents, but they and several other states controlled by Democrats are pursuing the European Union’s energy-rationing policies and indeed have promised to keep their share of America’s Paris commitments to reduce emissions.

Keeping electricity rates down is also going to give manufacturers a large energy price advantage over competitors in other countries. Energy-intensive manufacturing is already coming back. The number of jobs in manufacturing is a defective measure because manufacturing output can increase while employment drops due to productivity gains from automation. Nonetheless, it is significant that manufacturing lost over one million jobs in Obama’s eight years, but gained 183,000 in Trump’s first year.

If the Trump deregulatory strategy is successful in reviving manufacturing, then it’s going to benefit many of the states that elected Trump. With high electricity prices that are going higher, companies are not going to be building new factories in California and New York. They are instead going to build in the heartland states that will continue to rely overwhelmingly on low-cost coal and gas for their electricity. China gets it. During his visit last fall, President Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Chinese companies to invest $83 billion in the state of West Virginia.

When negotiations were concluded in Paris in December 2015, the agreement was hailed as historic, a landmark, and a turning point for the planet. The Guardian headline called it “the world’s greatest diplomatic success”, and the New York Times headline proclaimed it a “Big, Big Deal”. When President Obama ignored the Senate’s constitutional role in ratifying treaties (or not ratifying treaties, as would have been the case with Paris) and officially joined up in September 2016 by merely sending a letter to the United Nations signed by him, he called it “an enduring framework that enables countries to ratchet down their carbon emissions over time, and to set more ambitious targets” (which are required every five years).

Yet when the promoters of the climate industrial complex were trying to convince Trump to stay in Paris, they toned down their rhetoric — way down: it’s really merely a voluntary agreement of little significance. If the US stays in, President Trump can ignore the US’s commitment to reduce emissions or replace it with a much less ambitious one. No one will mind. The important thing is just to stay in the club and pretend that you’re doing something to save the world.

Ha! is the only response to such bunkum. As the European Commission states in the first sentence on its Climate Action website and in bold type: “At the Paris climate conference in December 2015, 195 countries adopted the first-ever universal, legally binding climate deal.”

The fact is that the Paris climate treaty is a document expressing good intentions — what is currently called virtue signalling — for every country in the world but one. When the United States makes an international commitment, it stands by its commitment. If it doesn’t, then private parties, which in this case would be that environmental pressure groups, Democratic state governors, and perhaps multinational oil corporations, file suit to force the federal government to keep its commitment.

Thus staying in Paris would threaten to stymie President Trump’s ambitious plan to revive the American economy through deregulation and on the foundation of immense energy resources. If that plan succeeds, then US greenhouse gas emissions are going to stop declining, as they have done for the past decade, and start increasing again. The Paris treaty’s self-imposed economic straitjacket would make that impossible.

There are, of course, those who think that global warming is a serious problem that must be addressed and that Paris is a start. Although it looks increasingly doubtful that global warming is an imminent problem as rates of actual measured warming continue to lag far behind predictions of rapid warming made by computer models, they could be right. But it is nonetheless the case that even if global warming turns out to be a problem, then the Paris climate treaty cannot possibly be the way to solve it.

To begin with, it’s already failing. The treaty went into force in October 2016. In 2017, the European Union’s carbon dioxide emissions increased by 1.8 per cent. Global CO2 emissions went up 1.4 per cent, according to the International Energy Agency. (By the way, US emissions continued to go down in 2017 as a result of replacing coal with gas, which is less carbon intensive.)

Two weeks of UN negotiations in Bonn in May designed to agree on a “roadmap” to implement Paris were so unsuccessful that another week of talks were scheduled for Bangkok in September. The main sticking point in Bonn was, as it always has been, that nasty little question asked by delegates from developing countries: where’s the money? Then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and then-President Barack Obama had a wonderful idea in 2009 to push this question far into the future by proposing the creation of a Green Climate Fund. The developed countries would put in $100 billion a year to help developing countries deal with climate change.

The Green Climate Fund was created and over ten billion dollars has been deposited, but it’s supposed to start full operations in 2020. $100 billion a year suddenly looks an impossible goal. President Trump made it clear a year ago when he pulled out of Paris that he would never ask Congress for a penny to fund the Green Climate Fund. The funny thing is that even if Hilary Clinton had been elected president, Congress would never have agreed to fund the Green Climate Fund.

By making what still seems a stunning U-turn on climate and energy policies, President Trump has every prospect of leading the United States to a more prosperous and brighter future. Britain, the EU, and the rest of the world would do well to consider following his lead.

If only we in Australia had a Trump to sort out our energy chaos. Blessed by almost unlimited coal and gas reserves, the leaders of both our major parties have got the global warming religion and, as a result, have sent energy prices through the roof. From only recently having the cheapest electricity in the world, we now have it’s most expensive - our manufacturers now pay four times the amount paid by IS manufacturers. And while coal remains our biggest single export, we are closing down existing coal fired power stations and not replacing them. Successive state governments have banned even the exploration for new gas reserves. And yes, we have already started to have blackouts and manufacturing businesses have already been forced to close operations on days of extreme heat or cold. It’s a mess.

Michael Spencer

June 8th, 201811:06 AM

The REAL solution is to get on with "Generation IV" nuclear power generation; and "The Donald" has already released the shackles on this development in the United States after year of "greentape" during the Obama regime. It seems that the first production line units due to start rolling out this year - from China - surprise! surprise! Quite apart from cheap, clean, and totally safe electricity production (with almost zero waste - indeed, all the present 'waste' is not waste and can be recycled) because of the excess heat that will be available there are a number of side benefits: one of these is to desalinate sea water, virtually for nothing.
Run some pipelines inland; imagine what this could mean for inland rivers in countries like mine, Australia, just for starters! And then there's the availability of a continuous supply of medical isotopes, such as Alpha particle Bismuth 213 - absolutely deadly for the targeted killing of cancers, even diffuse ones such as leukaemia, up until now virtually impossible to get because of the structure of the present Light Water Reactors. And then, to address the nonsense about electric cars and carbon-taxing fuel with higher-than-allowable "carbon emissions": the cheap electricity can be used to extract carbonic acid from water - sea water will do because there's lots of that. Using the high temperatures that will be available this can be cracked to extract the hydrogen and the carbon and these can be strung together to produce what the Americans call GASOLINE!
"Fantasy!" I hear some think. No; it's been done already on a small scale at a US naval base. Take a look at this brief video, just for starters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_0ftKqQ9XE.
And then, there's the surprise that these new reactors will be able to run on a far cheaper and much more common element, using only a little uranium to trigger things off. And this common element is available at the moment as a nuisance-value waste from rare earth mining operations - just by way of example! If anyone would like to learn about this some more, I've sorted information into an order so people can start to wrap their minds around it with "blowing their brains" in the first instance. Download this interactive PDF about the climate http://www.galileomovement.com.au/.../ShouldYouReallyBeAl... and go to page 4 (Although page 3 rather sets the scene), and follow the links in sequence to page 7. Most interestingly, on page 5, you will find videos featuring internationally-renowned environmentalists who have learned of this new technology, and who have changed their minds from being "anti-" to "pro-" nuclear. An instructive lesson for some of out local (Australian)"Green" zealots perhaps?
And a final comment: because this new nuclear technology does not use water either for a coolant or to drive turbines to generate electricity, the units will be much smaller and far more efficient, operate at normal atmospheric pressures (so for example huge containment domes are no longer necessary, etc. thus much cheaper to start with), and Outer Woop Woop* could have its own unit. Minimal land space will be needed - in stark contrast to inefficient wind-farms and solar arrays - and also this will obviate the need for expensive power lines with the resultant "line drop". This technology makes the present enthusiasm for so-called "renewables" and "carbon taxes" nothing more than a sick joke!
* For the education of those not Australian, "Woop Woop" is a mythical out-back town. Get educated here http://www.koalanet.com.au/australian-slang.html#W!

James Rust

June 7th, 201812:06 AM

This charade has gone on long enough. The U.S. is the most blessed nation in the world with vast coal, oil, and natural gas resources, one million square miles of good farmland, and the people with skills and ambition to exploit those assets. With President Trump the U. S. will be the most powerful economic power the world has ever seen. It is foolish to go back to the Democrats attempts to hobble the country by preventing use of our assets.

Roger Graves

June 6th, 20181:06 PM

However it started out, the climate industrial complex is today largely driven by the wind and solar energy business. Since the year 2000, some 3 trillion dollars US has been spent on wind and solar energy, yet even this is dwarfed by estimates in excess of 20 trillion if all energy sources worldwide were to be replaced by wind and solar. Ally yourself to expenditures of this size and you can become rich beyond dreams of avarice, at the expense, of course, of the rest of us who will be paying bloated energy bills.
With this amount of money sloshing around, you can buy yourself no end of politicians, academics, and fading Hollywood stars. Money talks, and this amount of money screams. Don't expect the climate industrial complex to tuck its tail between its legs and slink off without a whimper. If it goes at all it will go kicking and screaming the whole way.

Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics)

June 1st, 201811:06 PM

Excellent analysis Mr Ebell.
I would only take issue with your supposition that global warming "could be right." Covering all bases is not the way that we do science. As Nobel Laureate in Physics Richard Feynman explains here:
http://www.richardfeynman.com/
we guess a new theory, compute the consequences, and compare those computations against the real world. If the comparison fails, the theory fails.
As you mention, the Climate Models run far too hot when compared against robust empirical data. Since the models are the computations that incorporate what proponents of the theory claim it to be, a failure to match observations (by a long ways) dooms the theory.
In science, we do not continue to give any credence to an old theory that has failed, even if doing so creates some sort of tautology that cannot be questioned because it covers all possibilities. We do not continue to talk about static continents instead of Continental Drift. We do not continue to talk about stress causing peptic ulcers instead of a bacterium. Etc. etc.
Science gives us a method to evaluate theories. And we need to use it. Superstitions need to be discarded.
By the way, last month marked the 100th anniversary of Richard Feynman's birth.

Hans Schreuder

May 31st, 20185:05 PM

Once you realise that there is no such phenomenon as a greenhouse effect in our atmosphere and that the so-called greenhouse gases in fact are the biggest coolers of the atmosphere, it is obvious that no amount of emission reductions is going to work. It is physically impossible for atmospheric carbon dioxide to make the world warmer than the sunlight makes it, no matter how many times that heat is recirculated. Does a thermos make the coffee warmer than it was when you put it in? Check http://ilovemycarbondioxide.com/ for all the facts you'll ever need to come to the right conclusion: man-made climate change is indeed a hoax and a huge one at that.

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